Now I don't know if Sky were tipped off via conventional channels that the Minister was going to tweet something significant; or if it was picked up by the Press Association first... that's usually where Sky's breaking news straps come from. Sky's Millbank studio should probably be keeping an eye out for precisely this sort of thing, but I don't know if they are yet. It doesn't really matter how it got there, though: there it was, word for word, on my TV screen, and being read out by the presenter. That's the kind of media coverage press releases just don't get.

Press officers in government, you'd better get into the social web thing before your minister does.

The simple answer can be found in our Browser Support Standards. These standards define the levels of support for the various browsers and devices used to access bbc.co.uk: some JavaScript libraries may conform to these standards, but many do not, and those that do may change their policies in the future. Given this fact, we decided that the only way to ensure a consistent experience for our audiences was to develop a library specifically designed to meet these standards.

They're clearly sensitive to this question, as there's a whole section about it on the Glow website itself, specifically referencing my own current favourite, jQuery. 'On reviewing the major libraries we found that none met our standards and guidelines, with browser support in particular being a major issue,' they explain.

So why not contribute to something like jQuery, to make up for its deficiencies? Isn't that the whole point of open source? 'Many of the libraries had previously supported some of our "problem" browsers, and actively chosen to drop that support... Forking an existing library to add the necessary browser support was another option, and one that might have had short term benefits. However, as our fork inevitably drifted apart from the parent project we would be left with increasing work to maintain feature parity, or risk confusing developers using our library.'

I've written here in the past in praise of the BBC's browser standards policy, and I stand by that. But I'm afraid I'm not buying this defence of their decision to reinvent the wheel - and, it must be noted, ending up with results remarkably close to jQuery. The best argument seems to be the risk that libraries which currently meet their standards might not in the future; or that they might have to do work to keep a fork in sync. And even if that should happen, the worst case scenario is that they'd have to churn out a load of new Javascript. Which is what they've chosen to do anyway.

Plus, crucially, this isn't about a bunch of geeks directing their spare-time volunteering efforts in one direction, rather than another. These are people being paid real money, taxpayers' money, to do this, at a time when the BBC is supposed to be trimming its ambitions. If they're at a loose end, perhaps they might want to address the News homepage's 416 HTML validation errors, and abandon the 'table' markup.

Maybe I've just been unlucky in my career, but I've never seen an intranet I didn't dislike. So the opportunity to design one, based on the experience of the 2.0 Years, was quite appealing. Inspired in particular by the work of Jenny Brown and Lloyd Davis at Justice, we based our thinking on the notion of an RSS dashboard. Since the biggest problem with most intranets is that they aren't reliably updated, we thought, why not build an intranet that updates itself? So at its heart, the site is a huge RSS archive - pulling in news releases and media commentary from UK government, international organisations, expert analysts and humble bloggers. And since it's all sitting on top of a WordPress MU installation, it's easy for us to make each item commentable - on the platform itself, rather than at the originating site.

Of course, there's a risk of information overload. So we've built a 'collaborative editing' function - along the lines of Google Reader's shared items, but done as a group thing. If you read something which you think your colleagues ought to see too, you click the star icon, and it gets promoted to a 'daily highlights' list on the site homepage. Then, at the end of each day, there's a Daily Email which rounds up all the 'starred items' - so even if you never look at the website, and we're realistic enough to accept that some won't, then you can still get the benefit from it.

We've used various WordPress plugins to add calendar functionality; to allow users to upload (non-restricted) documents; to put their faces against their contributions, making the place feel a bit more human; and even to allow senior staff to blog on the site via email. You could probably accuse us of throwing the entire 2.0 playbook at the project, and you'd be absolutely right. But apart from the core aggregation and recommendation functionality, everything else uses off-the-shelf open-source plugins, installed and configured (generally) within a few hours. So if they don't work out, what have you lost?

This project has taken up most of my time for the past four months; working with my regular co-conspirators Simon Wheatley and Jonathan Harris, we've pushed the boundaries of the technology, and tested the limits of the civil service mindset. Although many of the individual elements have been tried before in government, I believe it's the first time anyone's tried to do all of it, all together - and crucially, all on an in-house system, which opens up some very interesting possibilities. (And yes, as ever, you might be pleasantly surprised by the price tag, too.)

So is this finally an intranet I like? I'll offer a provisional yes for now, but maybe it's better to ask me again in a few months. Since it's a closed system, there's limited scope for me to demo it... but if it's something you might be interested in, ask me very nicely, and I'll see what I can do.

But at what cost?, LibDem MP Paul Holmes asked. The answer came in Hansard at the end of last week: 'the Department spent £953,911 on the creation of a new website. This included the design of both an initial website launched shortly after the creation of the Department and a later improved version. This total covers the purchase of hosting and content management system as well as project management and content migration (i.e. staff) costs.' Yes folks, nine hundred and fifty thousand... and taking the answer at face value, that doesn't include day-to-day running costs.

(Incidentally, you might want to cross-reference this answer against Sion Simon's response to Oliver Heald last November: £100k for design, £240k for hosting and content migration, annual maintenance of £85k. None of them small figures by the way, but they still only get us half-way to that £950k total. Hmm.)

Now listen, I've worked on the inside, and I know how the costs mount up. By the time you factor everything in - from staff costs to stationery cupboard - you're left with a surprisingly high figure for 'what a website costs'. But no matter how pretty your website is, no matter how clever it is, £953,911 over two years is too much... before we even get to the cost of then ditching it, in the wake of a reshuffle. I'm sure there are reasons, and I'm sure there were good people doing their best. But it's very telling to look back over DIUS written answers, at references to how the website cost was lumped into larger IT outsourcing contracts, and couldn't be separately costed.

As for Facebook itself? - if you try to access the obvious vanity URL, facebook.com/richardallan, you get forwarded to /richard.allan (note the dot), which is someone else entirely. Nice touch, Facebook HR.

'In Britain today, there are over 100,000 public bodies producing a huge amount of information,' he said; 'Most of this information is kept locked up by the state. And what is published is mostly released in formats that mean the information can't be searched or used with other applications... This stands in the way of accountability.' Now I'm still not convinced that there's that much deliberate, conscious locking-up of data; but certainly, the formats in which that data is eventually made available often has the same end result.

OK, so we're broadly agreed on the problem... what's the solution, Dave?

We’re going to set this data free. In the first year of the next Conservative Government, we will find the most useful information in twenty different areas ranging from information about the NHS to information about schools and road traffic and publish it so people can use it. This information will be published proactively and regularly – and in a standardised format so that it can be 'mashed up' and interacted with.

What's more, because there is no complete list that can tell us exactly what data the government collects, we will create a new ‘right to data’ so that further datasets can be requested by the public. By harnessing the wisdom of the crowd, we can find out what information individuals think will be important in holding the state to account. And to avoid bureaucrats blocking these requests, we will introduce a rule that any request will be successful unless it can be proved that it would lead to overwhelming costs or demonstrable personal privacy or national security concerns.

If we are serious about helping people exert more power over the state, we need to give them the information to do it. And as part of that process, we will review the role of the Information Commissioner to make sure that it is designed to maximise political accountability in our country.

Now don't get me wrong here, it's great to have Cameron's explicit sign-up to the principle of data freedom, standardised formats, the presumed right of availability, and a 12-month timeframe. But it's not really anything that the other major parties aren't already talking about - and in the case of the current government, bringing in the Big Guns to actually do something about. OPSI's data unlocking service, for example, is nearly a year old, and effectively answers the 'wisdom of the crowd' idea. Now it hasn't been a huge hit... but the principle is already established.

And then there's his unfortunate choice of public sector jobs as an example of what they might do:

Today, many central government and quango job adverts are placed in a select few newspapers. Some national, some regional. Some daily, some weekly. But all of them in a variety of different publications - meaning it’s almost impossible to find out how many vacancies there are across the public sector, what kind of salaries are being offered, how these vary from public sector body to public sector body and whether functions are being duplicated. Remember this is your money being put forward to give someone a job – and you have little way of finding out why, what for and for how much. Now imagine if they were all published online and in a standardised way. Not only could you find out about vacancies for yourself, you could cross-reference what jobs are on offer and make sure your money is being put to proper use.

Er, isn't Mr C aware of the recently-upgraded Civil Service Jobs website - with its API, allowing individuals and commercial companies to access the data in a standardised format (XML plus a bit of RDF), and republish it freely? The Tories have talked about online job ads since December 2006; maybe it's time they updated their spiel.

So what does today's pledge boil down to? On one level it's just headline-grabbing, bandwagon-jumping, government-bashing, policy-reannouncing rhetoric. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. If all the work is going on already, but it isn't well enough known, or isn't proving as effective as it could/should be,  maybe we should be welcoming any headlines the subject manages to grab. And if Cameron's Conservatives do take power at the next election, and truly believe in what was said today, it would be the easy fulfilment of a campaign promise to yank these initiatives out of their quiet beta periods and into the limelight.

The newspaper media group's new blogs editor, Damian Thompson is buzzing with excitement at the potential which this move opens up. Among the 'immediate benefits' he highlights: faster operation, easier commenting, better integration with the wider site, even a Twitter element. (I'd add a few others myself, all available instantly with a bit of URL hacking.) But he's right to recognise that the switch won't be immediately popular - and guess what, the majority of the 200+ comments on his introduction post aren't positive. Yeah, we've all been there.

Most of the work, I understand, was done by the Telegraph's in-house team, with some assistance from my fellow WordCampers (and technically, I suppose, competitors) InterconnectIT. The firm's director, Dave Coveney says they're already working with another newspaper group and a magazine publisher. He's clearly seeing the same momentum I am; there's certainly no shortage of interest in WordPress just now.

The exciting part, I suppose, is the fact that the figures are to be published. I wonder how. If Sir Tim really is to lead a push to make government publish its raw data, wouldn't this make an excellent 'best practice example'?

On reflection, if you're going to put two of the most forward-thinking people in e-government into the same department, great things are probably to be expected. BERR (as was)'s Neil and DIUS (as was)'s Steph put their heads together on Monday afternoon, and on Wednesday, they launched a new corporate website for the newly-created Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. It's based on WordPress, with a bit of RSS magic, and the help of a few (free) web-based tools. And it's brilliant.

Steph documents the work with characteristic modesty:

It won’t win any design awards, and the downside to Heath Robinson web development will no doubt be some quirks in reliability. But happily, we can say we haven’t spent a penny on external web development or licencing costs, and we got something up within 3 days. Compared to the static, hand-coded site DIUS had for the first 18 months of its life, it’s a start, and a little bit innovative too.

Actually, I like the design: it's forcibly simple, but that's no bad thing, and is something they should try to maintain in the long run. There may be quirks; but that doesn't make it any worse than some of the £multi-million CMSes in Whitehall. Yes of course it's work in progress, but isn't everything - or rather, shouldn't it be?

I can't think of a better case study for the power of open source, web tools, pretty much everything I bang on about here. And if my work for the Wales Office was any kind of inspiration, I'm delighted to have been a part of it.

Oh, and just for the record... that's now the Prime Minister's office and the Deputy Prime Minister First Secretary of State's department running their websites on WordPress. I'm just saying...

This is meant to send a loud and clear signal to the civil service: raw data now. And I couldn't agree more; see this post, for example, from 2008 about 'API-first publication', in the context of the 2011 Census. But I think it's more about how that signal gets sent.

The Cabinet Office press release says:

He will head a panel of experts who will advise the Minister for the Cabinet Office on how government can best use the internet to make non-personal public data as widely available as possible. He will oversee the work to create a single online point of access for government held public data and develop proposals to extend access to data from the wider public sector, including selecting and implementing common standards. He will also help drive the use of the internet to improve government consultation processes.

It reads like a rather hands-off, committee-based kind of role. And whilst that wouldn't be a bad thing in itself, I wonder if it's what The Machine really needs from him. What's the question, to which 'Sir Tim Berners-Lee' is the answer?

I don't think we particularly need the advice on standards; and I don't know that TBL will be able to tell (checks the post-reshuffle situation) Tessa Jowell how to organise data publication processes inside the typical Whitehall department. But what he will be able to do is intimidate persuade those people who always seem to block the initiatives which have already gone before. He may have more success saying the exact same things many of us have already been saying for some time, because of who he is.

Stuart Bruce, who knows a thing or two about PR / technology / the Labour Party responded thus on Twitter: 'Opening access to government data YES! Well done. But Tim Berners-Lee? Isn't that just like Sugar, yet more cult of celebrity.' Maybe so. Probably so, in fact. But it may be exactly what we need.